The subject matter disclosed herein relates to turbine rotor wheels.
In a turbine engine, such as a gas turbine engine, cooling flows for the rotating turbine blades are extracted from air within a hub of a compressor section. Once this air is pulled off from the hub and into rotating machinery domains, typical practice is to design a passage to allow the air to flow radially deeper toward a rotation centerline. The goal of such passage design is to ensure that the flow of the air rotates at a similar speed as the machinery components so losses can be reduced when the flow direction is changed.
With these goals in mind, passage design often yields circuits in which ends of relatively short radial inflow passages are characterized by full 360-degree continuous chambers and a given number of long “gun holes” extending axially toward the turbine. In this way, the passage design results in less pressure loss across the passage and provides freedom to mechanical designers to place the gun hole entrances at a relatively high radius so they can pursue superior robustness and reliability.